


Day Jobs

by CherryIce



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-26
Updated: 2006-04-26
Packaged: 2017-10-07 06:36:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/62411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CherryIce/pseuds/CherryIce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The bar, like its patrons, is dusty and tired.  Post PotW.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Day Jobs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KiaraSayre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KiaraSayre/gifts).



The bar, like its patrons, is dusty and tired. The windows are boarded over because there are better uses for the generators than powering decorative force shields, and it's not like anyone needs a reminder that the horizon's still on fire. Someone has a music chip hooked up to a broken-down pair of speakers and is playing something classical and alien. Yelang, Jack identifies, if only because of the mix of oboe and Hemarian horn. There's a couple dancing slowly by the door, heads propped on each other's shoulders and shadowed eyes closed. Most of the patrons have a distinct lean on, dust in their hair, shoulders curled down over their drinks.

 

There are other bars, yeah, bars with bright lights and loud music, down home pubs where people sing old songs, discordant and out of tune. Other bars, but Jack looks down at his broken nails and the cuts on his hands; and he is too tired for the overly bright eyes, for desperate smiles that fade into the dark.

 

Everyone he meets is somewhat off  fervent in their energy or still slightly shell-shocked, like a world of windup toys with their gears all somewhat off. He supposes he can't blame them  it was only two months ago that the (their) world ended, after all. They know only in the most academic of ways that this has happened before, and will happen again.

 

Before Jack left the Game Station, he sent out a broadwave transmission to the universe at large. He thought of sending some sort of pithy message, but he thought of Roderick, of Lynda, and he set about disabling the Doctor's contraption. (Never used, and he thought: 'thank the gods,' and 'this is why I died?')

 

First ships from the colonies arrived about a month ago, Jack hears, but the Earth is a big place, and in this century mankind is covering every plain, clinging to every mountain face, every crack and crevasse. It's going to take time, a whole lot of patience and time, and Jack really doubts that the knowledge that the glow on the Southern horizon is a controlled burn now is a comfort to anyone.

 

He is doing what he can, organizing work crews and hauling lumber and trying to convince the water purification centre it wants to run on a battery of generators. The generation around him (and the one before, and the one before that) was fixed to their televisions for most of their natural lives, afraid of the air outside. They wear masks now, and break during the heat of the day, but Jack is almost violently glad that uninvasive genetic manipulation against cancer became common practice back in the 32nd century. He wonders, sometimes, about the accumulation of other toxins, about the composition of the ash that coats his skin at the end of the day (better, almost, if it is not all carbon, and he thinks about the bodies he had to leave on the Game Station and he closes his eyes).

 

As a Time Agent, as a conman, he has walked away, and finds himself wondering how many scenes just like this the Doctor has left. There are no thrilling heroics here, and they don't get to head off on another adventure. It is work and blood and sweat and tears, and Jack knows he is needed here; knows it and cannot bring himself to resent it (at least, not much, not most days).

 

Jack drinks his whiskey, and he listens to the oboe rise and fall. Maybe tomorrow night he will go to one of the other bars and lose himself on the dance floor, breathe in the desperation and let someone buy him a drink. Maybe tomorrow, at the end of the day, when the works crews are back, he will let Joseph or Susan, or Joseph and Susan, drag him home and they will fall asleep exhausted in a fully-clothed tangle of limbs.

 

This is not Jack's place, not Jack's time, but he has always liked to be needed, and he no longer has any place else to be.


End file.
